scholarly journals Deep Reinforcement Learning Techniques For Solving Hybrid Flow Shop Scheduling Problems: Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C)

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdulrahman Nahhas ◽  
Andrey Kharitonov ◽  
Klaus Turowski
Algorithms ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Han ◽  
Guo ◽  
Su

The scheduling problems in mass production, manufacturing, assembly, synthesis, and transportation, as well as internet services, can partly be attributed to a hybrid flow-shop scheduling problem (HFSP). To solve the problem, a reinforcement learning (RL) method for HFSP is studied for the first time in this paper. HFSP is described and attributed to the Markov Decision Processes (MDP), for which the special states, actions, and reward function are designed. On this basis, the MDP framework is established. The Boltzmann exploration policy is adopted to trade-off the exploration and exploitation during choosing action in RL. Compared with the first-come-first-serve strategy that is frequently adopted when coding in most of the traditional intelligent algorithms, the rule in the RL method is first-come-first-choice, which is more conducive to achieving the global optimal solution. For validation, the RL method is utilized for scheduling in a metal processing workshop of an automobile engine factory. Then, the method is applied to the sortie scheduling of carrier aircraft in continuous dispatch. The results demonstrate that the machining and support scheduling obtained by this RL method are reasonable in result quality, real-time performance and complexity, indicating that this RL method is practical for HFSP.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 1174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xuelian Pang ◽  
Haoran Xue ◽  
Ming-Lang Tseng ◽  
Ming K. Lim ◽  
Kaihua Liu

Prior studies are lacking which address permutation flow shop scheduling problems and hybrid flow shop scheduling problems together to help firms find the optimized scheduling strategy. The permutation flow shop scheduling problem and hybrid flow shop scheduling problems are important production scheduling types, which widely exist in industrial production fields. This study aimed to acquire the best scheduling strategy for making production plans. An improved fireworks algorithm is proposed to minimize the makespan in the proposed strategies. The proposed improved fireworks algorithm is compared with the fireworks algorithm, and the improvement strategies include the following: (1) A nonlinear radius is introduced and the minimum explosion amplitude is checked to avoid the waste of optimal fireworks; (2) The original Gaussian mutation operator is replaced by a hybrid operator that combines Cauchy and Gaussian mutation to improve the search ability; and (3) An elite group selection strategy is adopted to reduce the computing costs. Two instances from the permutation flow shop scheduling problem and hybrid flow shop scheduling problems were used to evaluate the improved fireworks algorithm’s performance, and the computational results demonstrate the improved fireworks algorithm’s superiority.


2015 ◽  
Vol 766-767 ◽  
pp. 962-967
Author(s):  
M. Saravanan ◽  
S. Sridhar ◽  
N. Harikannan

The two-stage Hybrid flow shop (HFS) scheduling is characterized n jobs m machines with two-stages in series. The essential complexities of the problem need to solve the hybrid flow shop scheduling using meta-heuristics. The paper addresses two-stage hybrid flow shop scheduling problems to minimize the makespan time with the batch size of 100 using Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Simulated Annealing algorithm (SA). The computational results observed that the GA algorithm is finding out good quality solutions than SA with lesser computational time.


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